I've been playing a newbie just to try to basically A. ) Enjoy the game and B.) See what it's like from a player perspective.

This made me think of something

What if there were quests - maybe we call them deity quests - but not exactly - maybe even quests given by some organization - say a group of people working for Mystra that want to understand all "realities".

Basically the idea is that you'd get some item - by doing something like "bio quests request" - or perhaps some easier syntax.

This item would have some hint about where you need to go - you go there with this item - and then use the item - it throws you (and your party) into an alternative version of that area - that is populated by random monsters of your level range - so potentially you could be level 45 and get sent to an alternative version of echoes mountains that is populated by monsters that would challenging for you (in theory at least).

I'd say that at level 10 you'd only ever be asked to go to areas level 10 or below, but the higher level you are the more potential areas you could go to.

Anyway, inside this area you are tasked with retrieving something / killing something - once you do this ends your "alternative world" and you are rewarded with some amount of experience, gold, and/or tokens/enchanting materials.

Maybe some other random stuff.

Now I said Deity quest because it would make more sense if your deity was tasking you with doing this but I mean the making sense part from a RP point of view is less important to me - I know to some of you it's probably more important - but I mean realistically we shouldn't be carrying around 1 million gold coins either.

I already have code for the alternative world bit (for the upcoming Dallyh update) - but I wanted to get opinions on the idea. Would you, as a player, enjoy something like this? Personally I think I would, but maybe I'm a minority.

I'd say that there is a time limit - you could only do one quest like this every 2 hours. I thought about potentially replacing the quest boards with this, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder why both can't exist. Just to have more for people to do.

Hmm, another thought dawned on me - maybe stealing from another mud - but maybe it's one of these quests per level, until max, and then per time period - would give you potentially a reason to level slower.

If you do it, dont do it for the sake of leveling slowly. The reason nobody wants to stay low level is because the RP at low level tends to just be socializing in a bar. For a variety of reasons.

As,for the idea itself... I do like it a lot. Give players a reason to head back to lower level dungeons.I always support anything that promotes dungeon crawling.

Maybe put minimum player requirements on them. It would be nice if people had a reason to come talk to my character. And ever asked me to go somewhere with them._________________PM me in the forum here when you want me on to RP or dungeon dive. The forum will automatically notify me by e-mail. Then my e-mail will send me a text message. Then I will get on likely within minutes.

I wouldn't actually do this with the idea to encourage people to level slower. I just thought maybe if the rewards were good enough some people might decide to level slower to take advantage.

I don't think you would need to do these solo either, as in person A gets the quest, but person B and person C can help him out and all are rewarded at the end of it (maybe person B, C get slightly less).

I agree with Verbannon on both the RP point and the dungeon crawling - I have always loved dungeon crawling.

- I don't agree that anything meant for everyone should ever be deity based. Some people just aren't very religiously aligned. (An idea I had is that maybe we can have wandering psionic nomads or gypsies or something that offer to "Sell an Adventure!" That is, it wouldn't even have to be a quest, per se. Maybe these could even replace the gnome vendors, on Verbannon's behalf).

- Setting up large rewards for a daily quest would be pretty fantastic, and inspire people to log in at least once to collect! An area where we could grab up tokens and mats and exp (or maybe we get to "Choose an Adventure!" based on our individual desires?)

- Please make it so we can extract ourselves from the alternative world at any time. I hate getting stuck places (I know, I tend to whine about that a lot).

- Exploring is fun, and alternative ways of gaining exp are always VERY welcome.

Okay, here are my thoughts on "perimeters" of this so far - IE how I want to make them operate.

To receive one:

I actually think that they should not be deity based, because of the points made by ViolaRose. Originally I had thought along the same lines - especially given that now we can be godless in creation.

I am not sure if I want to go with a syntax to request a quest like this or maybe the idea of a wandering nomad that offers adventures to the brave/curious/etc. I will probably figure this out last.

Rewards:

First one of these completed per day would reward like 4x - but some combination of experience + gold/or tokens - maybe even some token gear that is repairable but has less durability OR perhaps I could stick some token gear in the final room of any given area that is repairable, just to see this gear have more long term use - but have this happen rarely.

Constraints on a particular adventure:

You receive an item - it would have some hint on it about where you need to go - (this might be time consuming simply because I will need some "hints" for each area and I need to define boundaries for each area) - you go into this area, use the item, and are put into this alternative world - it would have some random assigned monsters - basically from any available IG monsters within a given level range. This means that sometimes these areas could be exceptionally difficult - or sometimes not so difficult.

Once you use this item - you can freely use it to move between the alternative world and back to where ever you entered it, for a time limit of say 3 or 4 hours - once the item expires the world itself would be eliminated and the ability to complete the area would be forfeit.

You could choose to do one of these adventures every 2 RL hours - I think I'll ditch the per level requirement entirely - but the first one completed each day - not tried - but actually completed - would reward 4x the reward. I think I can set it up so that you are free to take your friends with you into your adventure - if you wanted to do so - and you would both be rewarded based on whether or not it was your first adventure completed per day or not.

I am going to work on the code for this today. I have some code running in the background now that is building a list of monsters game wide - so potentially as more areas go in the game, as more people see more places, then the lists of potential monsters you might encounter in one of these "adventures" is going to increase.

I have some disagreements. First off, I think random monsters would make it a whole lot less fun. As it would make it feel a lot less like doing that particular crawl. And feel more like well, a bunch of random monsters suddenly appearing in the goblin keep for no reason. I would like it a lot better if the monsters simply leveled up high enough to match the party in question. If the monsters are built anything like real D&D monsters than that shouldn't be too hard._________________PM me in the forum here when you want me on to RP or dungeon dive. The forum will automatically notify me by e-mail. Then my e-mail will send me a text message. Then I will get on likely within minutes.

Can players who are not meant to be in an "alternate area" get in? If not, it creates an effective pk safe zone. If they can, need to make sure bystanders don't accidentally walk into the quest area (like someone trying to get into echoes mountains and ends up in a level 35+ area.)

Anyone remember elvanta? It was removed for a reason. If you do this, make sure none of the mobs drop quest items or items which are needed to get into/out of other areas. (Reavers from demongate, hags from deku, mobs from Archemond's place come to mind).

How will you ensure the difficulty scales effectively going forward? Suggest allowing players to set their own difficulty, by having an option to do a quest that is easier/harder/the same as the previous one, with higher rewards for more difficult quests. Play with multiple variables to make it harder (difficulty if mobs, number of mobs, re spawn rate, time limit, number of party members allowed).

Will multiple groups be allowed to quest simultaneously in the same area at different difficulty levels?

As of now all "regular" gear on any mob is still there, but not allowed to be got by players - there is an exception made for mobs that spawn stuff on death - I may need to figure out a workaround for this.

I used regular in quotes because I believe mobs could still spawn random treasure and players could pick that up - from my perspective I do not think that is a bad thing.

You cannot get inside an alternative world - without an item linked to it - or being in a party and in the same room with someone who uses an item linked to it.

I wasn't really going for a "time limit" per say - that's why I had set it to relatively high - but that is not too bad of an idea and since I've already got a time limit set, by default, it shouldn't be difficult to scale it.

Right now only spawn rate is impacted - the higher level you are, the more stuff is likely to spawn. Mob difficulty is a bit more iffy - since as it is you could potentially have a really difficult area or a simple one - and you're basically retrieving a fragment of the world in order to "stop" the magic creating it from spreading - which can either be on a mob or in a room - so it could take awhile or be quick, though as more mobs spawn, the more likely it is that the item will show up. I could however, add the ability to have a modifier that would potentially increase the level of mobs you could encounter - so at level 20 you could encounter level 25 or 30 mobs. (Champions also exist within these areas, and it would be possible that the most difficult champion has the item you need - and in the event of an item you need existing in the world, another will not spawn).

I'm resurrecting an old thread, just because I have been playing a bit after getting the gossip command in.

My initial experience of bio quests is that they are a lot of fun - I've not yet had the experience of an area without a fragment that others have suffered with. The issue I'm a bit concerned about is that, at least for me so far, the rewards seem very large for the amount of effort involved.

As an example, if I am after tokens, my L11 character can try hunting shifters for maybe 10 tokens at a time - and the shifters will generally kick his butt. On the other hand, if he does a bio quest, I've generally been able to find the fragment within about 10-15 min utes with little risk, for a reward of around 88 tokens.

It's a similar story with gold - if I want gold, there's really not much point trying for it any other way, in terms of the amount of reward vs the amount of risk/effort. I've not yet gotten round to playing with crafting, so I don't know how mats work.

Potential issues with my perception of this are that this character is quite low level, so things may balance out more later on. He is also high cha, which means that many of the mobs in the bio quest areas don't attack him, so he can ignore them unless they happen to have the fragment.

Generally I only do the quests for materials, but have at very early levels completed them for gold or tokens. As to the amount provided, I think it is reasonable. Only once every 24 hours will you get tokens as you described. Also you may have only spent 10-15 minutes inside, but you can only do this 2 hours apart. How many shifters can you hunt in that time? Tokens are a bad example anyway since, depending on the class, they are easier for some more than others. Now once you get up in levels you find it is nearly suicide to enter the quest area without a mercenary to heal you. And in some cases that doesn't matter anyway because you might run into mobs that kill you suddenly. My nemesis is 3 uncle istvans when they first start showing up. All in all though I love the quests and you have been lucky in always finding the fragment. Some areas are small and the fragment is just not there the first time, but as luck will have it you can return over the next two hours and maybe get lucky.

Hmm. When I first started doing the quests, I was also awed by the reward and wondered if it was too much. Then I started grinding for mats and quickly stopped wondering. In my experience, the biography quests jump in difficulty every time you reach a new tier and can be very deadly indeed, as Whisper points out. At level 35 circa, I first came across a mob I could only hurt with my heavy damage feat. Now in my early 40ies, I have once again encountered a mob I cannot damage with my current arsenal and who is also deadly.

At the lower levels, they have replaced the need for shifter-hunting for my various characters, pretty much making them obsolete. Given how temporary shifter gear is though, I have not found the rewards too unbalancing. It certainly makes the game easier, especially when it comes to coin collection. I might suggest extending the time between requests rather than cutting the reward though, as currently the times that you find the fragment in 5-10 minutes makes up for the times when you canít find it at all.

The comparatively high rewards of the biography quests have made it my favorite place to go alone, to grind for XP and whatever reward I need at the time. It also allows me to really enjoy all the other quest areas in the game, because it lets me go there to explore like an adventurer rather than a player wanting X XP to level._________________"The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head." T. Pratchett

They are too dangerous for the type of characters I play at low levels and way too inefficient at the endgame. End game characters can make more mats/money/tokens in much shorter time._________________Eternal Summer